Hong Kong-Palermo | Fluid Cities

Being a modern university does not mean simply carrying out with rigor and commitment the role of an educational and research agency, but increasingly requires the need to open up to the city, the region and the world. It means extending our relationships by letting people and ideas navigate the long networks of knowledge, comparison and collaboration. For this reason the University of Palermo is decisively increasing its activity of internationalization and of openness to the inputs that come from the society of widespread knowledge in which we are immersed. In the liquid society also the university must change its mission, capturing the transformations of the contemporary, renewing the modalities of cultural and social relationship, more co-operative and cosmopolitan. In this challenge for the renewal of the deepest meaning of the universities the International Workshop Hong Kong-Palermo promoted by professors Maurizio Carta and Dario Russo of the Department of Architecture together with the colleagues of the prestigious Raffles Institute in Hong Kong is an important step also because it inaugurates an innovative teaching mode in which groups of students and tutors of different cultures meet together on the same topic, mutually enriching their visions and techniques, crossing a new Silk Road between Asia and Europe in which ideas and projects flow.